The achievement of labeling was investigated in a longitudinal study of one mother-infant dyad, using video-recordings and analysis of joint picture-book reading. Participating in a ritualized dialogue, rather than imitation, was found to be the major mechanism through which labeling was achieved. (Author/SW)

This work investigated the young child's ability to respond appropriately to the intended, as opposed to the literal, meaning of one class of such utterances, requests for action. An action-based response heuristic is proposed to explain the apparent ability of two-year-olds to deal with indirect speech acts. (Author/SW)

An experimental and control group of thirty-two four and five year-old children received identical quantitative tasks except for the language used. Results showed that children's difficulties with simple arithmetic tasks were not purely linguistic. The conclusion supports the suggestion that the development of language is intertwined with…

The language development of monozygotic twins, same-sex dizygotic twins, siblings of monozygotic twins, and siblings of dizygotic twins, ages 3-17, was studied to estimate how much of the individual variation in children's language skills results from genetic factors and how much from environmental experience. (BRT)

Compared with 30 normal and 30 language-deviant 3-year-old Spanish speaking Puerto Rican children were two measures of linguistic proficiency. (Author/MH)

Piaget's concept of socialized speech was reevaluated with the use of everyday preschool speech collected during free play on 174 boys and girls aged 2 to 5. (MS)

Offers five classroom activities, some teacher centered and some child centered, that develop reading and writing in five-year-old children. (FL)

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)

Describes a teacher's metamorphosis from a controlling kindergarten teacher to one who recognized that children already have a great deal of language and print awareness and who could assist them in self-directed learning by giving their language instruction a context. (HTH)

Parents and teachers of 98 developmentally delayed children (ages 5-17) rated the childrens abilities for self-help, speech/language, and play skills and for the presence of behavior problems. Significant agreement was found on 77% of the items. The mean level of agreement was 68%. (Author/DB)

When lexical availability was manipulated through discourse support and word frequency for 40 target nouns, measurement of effects on length, complexity, order of mention, and fluency of 4- to 8-year-olds' utterances showed that the number and length of responses containing the target word varied with age, word frequency, and discourse support…

Production of the deictic verbs "bring" and "take" was evaluated among 88 normally functioning elementary school children. Results showed that data evaluation procedures greatly influenced conclusions, the second-to-emerge form was easier to learn in a conventional way, and the second term was the proactive stimulus for…

Fifteen 1-year-olds without otitis media were compared to 12 babies who were otitis positive. No significant differences were detected on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development or the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development (SICD) Receptive scale. However, the otitis-positive group exhibited lower SICD Expressive scores than the…